In the Presence of Mine Enemies (22 page)

When Heinrich came through the door a few minutes later, Alicia—who hadn't yet started getting rid of the potatoes—Francesca, and Roxane all swarmed downstairs to give him hugs and kisses. He needed a couple of minutes to wade through them and make his way into the kitchen. He hugged Lise and kissed her, then noticed the glass of schnapps on the counter near the sink. “Tough day?” he asked. Lise nodded. Her husband pointed to the glass. “Must have been. You don't usually do that. What happened?”

“Later.” Lise nodded in the direction of the children.

“Oh.” Heinrich nodded, too. He went to the cabinet for a glass of his own and also filled it full of schnapps. “Well, here's to us.”

“To us,” Lise agreed. They both drank. Their daughters wandered into the kitchen. Roxane wanted to help. Francesca wanted to tell her father about something that had happened at school. Lise couldn't tell what Alicia wanted—maybe just to remind herself that they were a family. Alicia kept eyeing her little sisters with an expression that said,
I know something you don't know
.

By what she'd said to Lise a little while before, she wished she didn't.

After a while, the girls went back upstairs. “Make sure you get clean,” Lise reminded Roxane—she'd sometimes skip a bath if she saw the chance.

“Well?” Heinrich asked.

Lise sighed. In a low, weary voice, she said, “Alicia said she didn't want to be a Jew. She said maybe the
Einsatzkommandos
knew what they were doing when they got rid of us.”

“Oh. Oh, hell.” Heinrich reached for his glass of schnapps and gulped at it. The laugh that burst from him was an ugly sound, one that had nothing to do with mirth. “Well, God knows she's not the first one of us to feel that way.”

“I understand that,” Lise said. “But still…”

“Yes. But still.” Another swig and her husband's glass was empty. He poured it down like that about as often as Lise drank alone. With another ugly laugh, he said, “Did I ever tell you I wanted to be an SS man when I was a little boy? Before I knew, I mean.”

“No.” Lise shook her head in astonishment. They'd been married almost fifteen years, but startling things still surfaced, like rocks working their way up through thin soil. “No, you never said a word about that.”

“Well, I did. I thought the black uniform was the most wonderful thing in the world, and of course this wasn't too long after we beat the United States, so SS men were heroes in all the movies and televisor shows where
Wehrmacht
men weren't. When my father told me, I didn't want to believe him. For a long time after that—a
long
time, I'm telling you—I thought we had it coming to us.”

“You never said anything about that. Never,” Lise said.

Instead of answering right away, Heinrich poured himself another glass of schnapps. His back was to her as he said, “It's not exactly something I'm proud of, you know.”

“I think we all go through it,” Lise said. “You sound like you had it worse than most of us, though.”

“I probably did.” Her husband shook his head, still not looking at her. “No, I certainly did. Even now, there are days when working at
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
seems like a poor second best, and I ought to have the SS runes on my collar tabs.”

“Could you have kept up the masquerade if you did?” Lise asked.

“Some people do,” Heinrich said, and she nodded. He sighed. “I'm glad—most of me is glad—I didn't have to try, though. Do you want me to talk with Alicia? Is she all right?”

“Maybe don't push it too hard right now,” Lise said after a little thought. “You know how, how—overwhelming it can be. I think she'll settle down. She just realized she'll always
know
what she is, no matter what she decides to do about it.”

“Ah, yes,” Heinrich said. “That's another moment we all have, sure enough. The curse of knowledge…”

“Alicia thinks it's a curse right now,” Lise said.

“I don't know what to do about it.” Heinrich set about emptying that second glass of schnapps. “I wish I did, but I don't think anybody who's…in our boat does.”

“We ought to have the Stutzmans over again,” Lise said. “Anna's been coping with it for more than a year now. Maybe she can help Alicia—and even if she can't, they can play together. And I was on the phone with Esther this afternoon, and she says Susanna's back from London with all sorts of wild stories.”

“Sounds good to me,” Heinrich said. “I'm going to have lunch with Walther in the Tiergarten tomorrow. I'll set something up then, and you can call Susanna.”

“All right.” Lise nodded. “What does Walther want to talk about?” She assumed he wanted to talk about something. People met in Berlin's greatest park to get out in the open air—and also to get away from the possibility of talking where microphones might overhear.

Her husband answered with a shrug. “Don't know yet. I'll find out.”

“Fair enough,” Lise said. “What's new at work?”

“Not much. We're all waiting to see what sort of
Führer
Heinz Buckliger makes, same as everybody else.” Heinrich held up a hand. “Wait. I take it back. There is one other interesting thing. These past few days, Willi's been very friendly with Ilse, for whatever that may be worth.”

“The secretary?” Lise asked. Heinrich nodded. Her next question was obvious: “Is she worth being friendly to?”

“Well, she doesn't do anything for me,” he answered. “Of course, I'm not Willi, and I'm not squabbling with my wife. I hope I'm not, anyway.” He leaned over and kissed her.

“You'd better not be,” Lise said. “How does Ilse compare to Erika?”

“As far as looks go, she doesn't,” Heinrich said. “But she's not telling Willi all the different kinds of fool he is every time he turns around, either. That's got to count for something, wouldn't you think?”

“It would with me,” Lise agreed. “But with a man, who
can say?” Heinrich made a face at that, but he didn't try to argue with her.

 

Walther Stutzman liked the Tiergarten. He enjoyed eating lunch there, regardless of whether he needed to talk with someone in something approaching privacy. If he brought a sandwich and some fruit and a vacuum flask of coffee to the large park west of the Brandenburg Gate, he could imagine himself in the country—if the country in which he imagined himself included plenty of other people eating, watching birds, strolling hand in hand, walking or running for exercise, or lying around in the sun in any clothing or next to none. The Berlin police did frown on complete public nudity, but more as a matter of excessive zeal than one of criminal intent. And what might go on under cover of the bushes…neither Walther nor the police were in the habit of investigating too closely.

Today he made a point of getting to the Tiergarten early, so he could stake out a bench before the noontime crowd made looking for one a hopeless chore. The grass was long and green. Come fall, a snorting harvester would mow it down and turn it into hay for animal fodder. In the meantime, it grew as it would.

He found a place to sit near the Hubertus fountain and the bronze fox-hunting group at the center of the park. He smiled, pleased with himself; he'd told Heinrich to start looking for him by the fountain. And here came his friend. Heinrich's gangly height and ungainly walk made him impossible to miss. Walther stood up and waved. A couple of beats slower than he should have, Heinrich waved back and came toward him.

“Hello,” Walther said. “Nice day, isn't it?”

“Why, so it is,” Heinrich said in mild surprise, as if he'd only just realized it. Maybe he had; there were times when Walther wondered how much that went on outside his own head his friend noticed. Heinrich sat down beside him.
“Was ist los?”

“You know about the Kleins?” Walther said.

“Oh, yes.” Heinrich nodded, his long face set in unhappy lines. “I do know about that. What's up with them?”

“I changed their genealogy, to give them a couple of possibly Jewish ancestors,” Walther said. Heinrich nodded again. With a sigh, Walther went on, “Their pediatrician is too damned efficient, though. He compared the revised chart with one he had from when their first son was born, and he noticed the changes. He not only noticed, he called in the genealogical authorities.”

“Yes, I've heard all this,” Heinrich said. “Esther told Lise, and Lise told me. It's a mess. One more thing for the Kleins—and for all of us—to worry about. Robert and Maria are still free, aren't they? That would be all we need, if they hauled them in for questioning—that on top of the poor baby.”

“We're probably lucky we haven't seen more Tay-Sachs cases,” Walther said. “So few of us left these days, and we marry among ourselves so much…. But that's not what I wanted to talk about.”

“What, then?” Heinrich asked.

“I made a mistake when I altered the Kleins' charts,” Walther said. “Anything that gets us noticed for any reason at all is a mistake. The question is, how do I fix it?”

“How
can
you fix it? It's done,” Heinrich said. A very pretty blond girl in a short sun dress walked by, leading a dachshund on a leash. Heinrich noticed her—and the ridiculous little dog.

Walther knew a certain amount of relief that some of the real world did impinge on his friend. He said, “Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. I could go back into the
Reichs
database again, and change the Kleins' records back to the way they were before I meddled the first time. Or I could just leave them alone and hope the storm blows over. Which do you think is the better bet?”

Heinrich's eyes got a faraway expression. Walther wasn't the avid bridge player some of Heinrich's
goyishe
friends were, but he'd sat down at the card table with him a few times. He wore this look when he was figuring out whether to run a finesse. He said, “If you leave things alone, they may decide the system hiccuped, or they may bring in the Kleins to try to find out what they know.”

“That's how I see it,” Walther agreed.

He wondered if Heinrich even heard him. His friend went on without even a pause for breath: “But if you change things a second time, they may decide the system hiccuped once but now it's back to normal, or they may decide somebody who isn't supposed to has access to it and can fiddle with it whenever he pleases.”

Walther Stutzman nodded again. “I see it like that, too.”

“All right, then,” Heinrich said. “Both ways, if they think it's a hiccup, everything is fine. So which is more likely and more dangerous—them questioning the Kleins or them questioning the software in the database system? With the Kleins, it goes from no Jews in the woodpile to a few possible Jews in the woodpile a long time ago.”

“On paper,” Walther said. The Kleins were as Jewish as the Stutzmans or the Gimpels. He needed to make sure Heinrich remembered that. “If they have a baby with Tay-Sachs disease, that's a red flag about what they really are.”

“It's a red flag, but it's not proof. This disease
can
happen to gentiles, too,” Heinrich said.

“If the genealogical authorities want to snoop, they're liable to find enough proof to satisfy them,” Walther said. “And there's no law that says they can't question the Kleins
and
check the database programming.”

Heinrich looked astonished. Maybe he'd been so caught up in
either-or
that that hadn't occurred to him. Walther wished it hadn't occurred to him, too. Unfortunately, it was all too likely to occur to the authorities. He said, “This isn't damned if I do or damned if I don't. It's liable to be damned if I do
and
damned if I don't.”

“I'm afraid you're right,” Heinrich said.

“I'm afraid I'm right, too,” Walther said. “And I'm afraid, period.”

“You'd better be afraid. We'd all better be afraid,” Heinrich said somberly. “If we're not afraid, we're dead. I think our best chance is sitting tight now, though. There's nothing to show the Kleins had any way to fiddle with the genealogical records, is there? He's a musician, and she's a
Hausfrau
. They can't lean on them too hard, not when the changes are so small.”

He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as
well as Walther. “They
can
do anything they want,” Walther said bluntly, and his friend winced and nodded, for that was undoubtedly true. He went on, “What they choose to do…may be a different story. I hope you're right about that. So you think we ought to wait and see what happens, then?”

“Don't you think that's our best bet?” Heinrich asked.